The Arched Bow Of The Institution of Display (original) (raw)
Related papers
Museums and the Shaping of Contemporary Artworks
Museum Management and Curatorship, 2006
In the museum context, curators and conservators often play a role in shaping the nature of contemporary artworks. Before, during and after the acquisition of an art object, curators and conservators engage in dialogue with the artist about how the object should be exhibited and conserved. As a part of this dialogue, the artist may express specifications for the display and conservation of the object, thereby fixing characteristics of the artwork that were previously left open. This process can make a significant difference to the visual appearance of the work, the nature of the audience's experience, and how the work should be interpreted. I present several case studies in which the nature of the artwork has been shaped by such dialogues, and discuss principles for resolving cases in which there is a conflict between instructions specified by the artist and those adopted by the museum.
Introduction: Art and display in principle and in practice
Introductory essay for Display of Art in the Roman Palace, 1550-1750, edited by Gail Feigenbaum with Francesco Freddolini. This book explores the principles of the display of art in the magnificent Roman palaces of the early modern period, focusing attention on how the parts function to convey multiple artistic, social, and political messages, all within a splendid environment that provided a model for aristocratic residences throughout Europe. Many of the objects exhibited in museums today once graced the interior of a Roman Baroque palazzo or a setting inspired by one. In fact, the very convention of a paintings gallery—the mainstay of museums—traces its ancestry to prototypes in the palaces of Rome. Inside Roman palaces, the display of art was calibrated to an increasingly accentuated dynamism of social and official life, activated by the moving bodies and the attention of residents and visitors. Display unfolded in space in a purposeful narrative that reflected rank, honor, privilege, and intimacy. With a contextual approach that encompasses the full range of media, from textiles to stucco, this study traces the influential emerging concept of a unified interior. It argues that art history—even the emergence of the modern category of fine art—was worked out as much in the rooms of palaces as in the printed pages of Vasari and other early writers on art.
PARSE Journal, 2021
"Endlessly from the Middle, Or, Toward curatorial/politics" reflects on situations of conflicts, unease, and failures as conditions fostering what I propose as curatorial/politics. It departs from various transformative moments of “[k]nowing at the limits of justice [that] must start before, but facing the beyond of, representation,” as Denise Ferreira da Silva proposes to think with that this text aims to mobilize as a condition for curatorial/politics to crystallize into a practice of making public. The components from which such a condition might emerge could include confusion, double-boundedness, and implicatedness as well as inhibition, failure, conflict, problems, re-starts, and rehearsals. Yet, this seems the only possible way, at this moment, to generatively conceptualize the exhibition as a “problem-space,” as David Scott proposed, meaning to hold onto the acts of making public as a process of in the making, as Von Osten suggested, to break through the modernist split of the object-subject relation. Such an unsettling can neither lead to a conclusion, nor does it have a defined beginning or end; instead it endlessly departs from the middle as an open wound toward the end of the exhibition at the limits of justice.
EXHIBITIVE CARTOGRAPHIES III Critical Instrumentation, Exhibitive and Curatorial Narratives
The conference is part of a wider program that includes the workshop “How to Write about Contemporary Art” which seeks to examine relations between art and contemporarity, the discourses that shape them and figures who produce them. As a follow-up to the conference, a major focus will be on analysing the role of the curator, institutional and non-institutional. The role of the contemporary art curator has radically expanded in the art world over the last several decades, and we could argue that the curatorial figure – whether one working within an institution or independently and non-institutionally – is a pivotal segment in understanding contemporary art. The main coordinates of this workshop range from drawing attention to the role of curators and curatorial collectives when acquiring relevant insights into the contemporary cultural context to examining the role of museums and galleries in contemporary society. By reviewing an exhibition event or how a particular collection is displayed, we examine the selection policies (acquisition policies, choice of exhibits). We examine how curators – with their critical and theoretical texts but also their practice – shape the history of contemporary art and anticipate/create future tendencies; we can also see how artists assume curatorial positions at museums, applying artistic methods – in lieu of linear museological narratives – such as the use of permanent collections or existing artefacts as materials, playing with the ways of seeing and with the exhibition as an all-around experience.
Exhibiting outside the Academy, Salon and Biennial, 1775-1999: Alternative Venues for Display
In recent years, there has been increasing scholarly interest in the history of museums, academies and major exhibitions. There has been, however, little to no sustained interest in the histories of alternative exhibitions (single artwork, solo artist, artist-mounted, entrepreneurial, privately funded, ephemeral, etc.) with the notable exception of those publications that deal with situations involving major artists or those who would become so—for example J.L. David's exhibition of Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) and The First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874—despite the fact that these sorts of exhibitions and critical scholarship about them have become commonplace (and no less important) in the contemporary art world. The present volume uses and contextualizes eleven case studies to advance some overarching themes and commonalities among alternative exhibitions in the long modern period from the late-eighteenth to the late-twentieth centuries and beyond. These include the issue of control in the interrelation and elision of the roles of artist and curator, and the relationship of such alternative exhibitions to the dominant modes, structures of display and cultural ideology.
Manifesto: Towards a Historical Critique of Exhibitions
2015
Introduction Literary critics write book reviews about new novels. Art critics review works of art and the exhibitions they are presented in. Exhibition critiques, however, seem to be much less developed. 1 In most popular reviews, most attention is usually paid to the shape, architecture and function of the building, rather than to the actual contents of the exhibition (a notable example being the reviews on the new Dutch Military Museum 2 ). In other instances, reviews are echoes of the press releases of the organising institutions, or evaluations of the accompanying marketing message. If they do go beyond that, they tend rely on specific disciplines such as art history. One might expect academic reviews to provide some much needed in-depth criticism. However, museums and exhibitions rarely receive substantial coverage in academic journals. Although we do find theoretical reflection on museum exhibitions, especially in the case of ethnographic museums and exhibitions, it often sto...